Quotes by Women Novelists

The road to hell was paved with the bones of men who did not know when to quit fighting.

To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.

Things get passed around so easily on the Internet. Fact becomes fiction and fiction becomes fact.

Love shouldn't make a beggar of one. I wouldn't want love if I had to beg for it, to barter or qualify it. And I should despise it if anyone ever begged for my love. Love is something that must be given — it can't be bought with words or pity, or even reason.

Jacqueline Susann

We turn to literature to remedy the loss, to impose some kind of meaningful order on the nonsequential.

In our days of prosperity it is more difficult to sustain a religious spirit than in times of adversity, because we are apt to forget that God who has bountifully given may also take away.

The world is shaped by two things — stories told and the memories they leave behind.

I've always thought fairies are like mushrooms, you trip over them when you're not thinking about them, but they're hard to spot when you're searching for them.

Riding upon the back of a waterhorse - what mortal had ever stayed in such a seat for so long? On a horse made of cold currents and liquid convergences, jests and trickery - pressed against a hide like the burnished sea of midnight, thing look different to the rider.

Cecilia Dart-Thornton

Just remember, I am not going anywhere, he said, still watching her lips. And if you ever try to hide from me, I will not believe you are dead. I will find you. Count on it.

Diana Pharaoh Francis

The gorilla is a strict vegetarian like the elephant and buffalo — three of the four most dangerous animals in Africa. It behooves one to walk softly with vegetarians.

Mary Hastings Bradley

O how beautiful is morning!
How the sunbeams strike the daisies
And the kingcups fill the meadow
Like a golden-shielded army
Marching to the uplands fair.

After she wrote her first two novels:

I thought I'd walk down the street and everybody would know I had written a book. But nobody took any notice of these two novels, and I stopped writing. I felt uneasy for about three years.

Beryl Bainbridge

The past is good (as we all know), twenty, thirty years back everything was good, anyone can tell you that.

Oh — oh, why is it that the members of a family feel privileged to treat one another with a cruelty they would not exhibit to the merest stranger?

Actors between plays are like ghosts looking for bodies to inhabit.

That there should be a purpose to suffering, that a person should be chosen for it, special — these are houses of the mind, in which whole peoples have found shelter.

My life is flashing lights and pointing fingers and uninvited visitors. Inches away, humans flatten their little hands against the wall of glass that separates us.The glass says you are this and we are that and that is how it will always be.

K. A. Applegate

You can tell a lot about a person not just by their successes, but by how they deal with their setbacks

Sarah Mlynowski

There has come a time when we can no longer remain silent but must speak up for our country which is being sold, abused, mined, depleted, drained, overworked, over-loved, its plants and animals becoming endangered and exterminated faster than we can renew them. Our country is silent, so we must speak and act to save it.

What would have been the effect upon religion if it had come to us through the minds of women?

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

To define a man: he must be a creature who makes me feel that I am a woman.

I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Books are for me, it must be said, the most important thing.

Diane Setterfield

Southern behavior was devious, depending on indirection, a fuzzy flirtation that relied on strategic hinting.

Bobbie Ann Mason

Perfume companies ought to bottle the smell of crisp bacon. Forget pheromones. I'll bet a woman with a little spot of bacon grease behind her ears would attract every male within a five-mile radius.